Simplified Shared Ethernet Adapters for PowerVM Virtualization

It removes the requirement for a dedicated control-channel ethernet adapter and VLAN id for each SEA failover configuration.

The SEA failover still supports the traditional provisioning of dedicated control-channel adapter in SEA failover virtual I/O servers. Existing SEA and SEA failover functionality continues to work as today. This allows existing SEA failover configuration to migrate to new virtual I/O server which supports new mechanism without making any changes to their configuration.

By removing the requirement for a dedicated control channel per SEA pairs, the SEA is implementing a new method to discover SEA pair partners using the VLAN 4095. Once the partners are identified,

The new simplified SEA failover configuration relies on some of the following dependencies.

VLAN 4095 is a reserved VLAN for internal management traffic. Power Hypervisor 7.8 or higher have the support for management VLAN 4095.

The HMC ensure that management VLAN 4095 is not user configurable.

The HMC also needs to ensure that SEA priority value is either 1 or 2, so that users do not configure more than 2 SEA in failover configuration.

Since the existing SEA failover configuration is still available, the following method is used to identify a simplified configuration.

The method to discover an SEA failover partner is decided based on user input for control-channel (ctl_chan) attribute of SEA device on the mkvdev command.

If the control-channel adapter is specified on the mkvdev command and the specified adapter is not one of the trunk adapter of SEA, this indicates a dedicated control-channel adapter is specified. After

If not control-channel adapter is specified on the mkvdev command the default trunk adapter (PVID adapter) of the SEA. Partners are discovered using the new discovery protocol implementation over the management VLAN 4095.